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Friday, 16 December 2011

Old Prairie Christmases

CHRISTMAS - 40'S STYLE

It had been a bitterly cold and blustery December
that year and. as on several other occasions during that wicked month, my father
had gone outdoors early in the morning and after a walk to the woodpile and
back, had come into the house and made that solemn official declaration of his
that my younger brother, John, and I dreaded so much. "Don't bother getting ready for school
today kids, it's too cold to go out".

It never failed to amaze me how my father,
without the aid of a thermometer, was able to take a short walk outdoors and
determine when it was 30 below. But he
had that gift, and his judgment was often carved in icy stone, never to be
questioned, and most certainly not to be disputed.

That was not to say that my brother and I didn't
try. We both loved school and to have to
stay home was the greatest of all punishments.
We'd beg, plead, entreat, promise to do everything short of taking the
feather quilt on our back, but we never won any of those sessions. My father was an authoritative figure and he
considered it his God-given duty to take care of his family. If it was too cold, it was his responsibility
to keep his family warm and safe!

Today was a special occasion however, and we
begged frantically. True, the two and a
half miles to the Kulish School was a long walk. But we were used to these walks; they were as
natural to us as the sunrise and the sunset.

"We'll bundle up so warm, the teacher will
have to search for us in those wraps", we promised, "but we just have
to go to school today."

Tonight was the Annual Christmas Concert and this
would be the final rehearsal. We just
could NOT miss that.

"Please, oh please," we begged.

Seeing Father's countenance unmoved, we turned to
Mother. Her heart melted easier than
Father's, though we knew we were treading on forbidden ground. Mother seldom dared to overrule his judgment
or undermine his authority and this action of ours could get us all in
trouble. Still, we knew that Mother had
a special way of talking to Father that sometimes worked miracles, and we were
desperate enough to try anything.

"Maybe, just this once", Mother's
appeal was hesitant, questioning, poised for retreat, if necessary. “It is concert night and they can stay in
school till after the concert. I’ll give
them extra sandwiches for supper.”

Father knew mother was not foolhardy. She never contradicted him and never
questioned his authority unless she had a valid reason. Her argument and reasoning made sense. Fully aware of this, Father agreed to harness
the horses, hitch them to the sleigh and drive us to school. He had never done this before and we knew we
had to be extra grateful for this extraordinary privilege.
Most people had vans mounted on the sleigh, with a little boxstove
inside to keep the occupants warm, but Father believed that if it was too cold for man to
brave the elements, he should offer the same respect to horses.

"Too cold for man," he'd say, "too
cold for horse".

And so, cold days meant staying home inside a
house kept cosy and warm by the big boxstove that sat in the middle of the big center room of the house and the wood stove in
the kitchen.

On those bitterly cold days, Father would let the
livestock out for water, but if they wanted back into the barn after the drink,
they were fed inside.

So this concession to Mother's petition went
against his grain we knew, but today, for her sake, Father was going to break
his own rule. We felt strangely
guilty. While he tended to Jack and Jory,
the two horses, Mother warmed up the two rocks in the oven that would keep our
feet warm. When the sleigh was brought
near the house, Mother packed us in with the feather quilt, wrapped the hot
rocks with towels and put them at our feet.
Then we left for school, feeling very humble, and grateful but also very
happy.

We did not take the road. That was plugged with big hard snow drifts,
some of them as high as twenty feet.
These were our secret play areas, though I suspect that Mother and
Father knew that when we left the house in the dark hours before dawn, often at
least half an hour before the usual departure time, or came home much later
than usual, also through darkness, that we had just been playing on the
drifts. But they never questioned or
scolded us about it because they knew we were just “enjoying the winter”.

We utilized that extra time to slide gleefully
down those steep slopes and then climb up the "stairs" that we had
dug out into the drift along the side to the top. Then it was another exciting slide down and
another and another. These were the
bonus thrills of winter and all us kids from the neighbourhood enjoyed this free sport that
nature herself provided. Who feels cold
when they're having such fun? Indeed,
staying home from school meant the curtailment of many pleasures, some approved
and others not. Even drifts on the school yard were
well utilized. We simple dug tunnels
through them and built forts underneath the hard packed snow. Winter cold or tons of snow were never a problem
for us.

Anyway, we bypassed all these treasure troves of
delight as we stopped at our neighbour's house to pick up their two big teen-aged
boys. They may as well ride since we
were all going in the same direction. We
drove through wide open fields where the snow was not deep, having been swept
off towards the fences and roadside by strong winter winds. We crossed from one farmer's field onto the next until we
hit the deep ravine that always created such a problem area for travel in the
winter.

Usually, people just drove through the field and
then through the next farmer's yard crossing the ravine beyond and came up the
other side. This year, there was a
special problem. The ravine had several
springs that often overflowed during the winter causing minor flooding. This year, with the weather being so severe,
each successive overflow froze to create countless layers of ice rendering that
section of the ravine too dangerous to cross with a team of horses and a
sleigh.

Father decided to try and get back on to the
regular road to cross the ravine. This
part was not badly flooded because the overflows had been frozen upstream. However to get to the road, he had to cross
those big drifts of snow along the fence line. Everyone
knew the snow was deep up on the hill, but down lower, it shouldn't be too bad,
he theorized.

He steered the horses to the corner of the field
that was down almost in the ravine. The
horses did fine for a while and then started sinking in the deep snow
beneath. Yet we were just about twenty,
maybe thirty, feet from the road.

"Giddap, Jory, Giddap, Jack", Father
encouraged and the two horses gave it all they had, leaping through the deep
snow, trying desperately to reach the road that was ahead of them. But each leap brought them down harder. Each heavy thrust of the hoofs perforated the
thick crust of numerous layers of accumulated snowfalls as the horses sank ever
deeper into the snow, until, with their feet stuck in its depths and their
bellies suspended by the drifts below them, they hung there, panting, no longer
able to move.

We were all frightened, my father, no less than
we, though he probably did not experience the utter hopelessness and guilt that
John and I did. Mumbling something under
his breath that, possibly, lucky for us, did not quite reach our heavily insulated
tender ears, he got out of the sleigh and walked over the top of the drift to
the front of the horses to assess the situation. No doubt about it. His precious Jack and Jory would never walk
out of there, unless they were dug out.

"Whoa Jack, Whoa Jory".

Patting the horses' frothing nostrils
sympathetically, he spoke soothingly, reassuring the helpless, bewildered
horses, that this was just a temporary situation, and that all they had to do
now was rest and he would make things normal again soon.

He had had the foresight to bring two shovels
along, and with the help of the two neighbour boys, who were as strong as any farmer's sons could
be, they set about to dig the horses out.
John and I were useless, of course, and since sitting there was not
going to keep us warm, Father allowed us to continue on our way to school,
walking, which was now only a mile away.

When we got to school, the class was already
rehearsing the play "Olga From DeVolga". There were about twenty items to
rehearse. Besides the play, there was
tap dancing by Stanley, recitations, carols, action songs, a Ukrainian Hopak
dance, guitar selections and yodelling by Rudy and of course, the final item
"Jingle Bells" which was to usher in gift bearing Santa himself.

The rehearsals continued and in our excitement
over the last minute preparations for the concert, John and I forgot our
worries about how Father and the boys made out with the poor horses. Shortly after lunch, the boys, Stanley and
Morris, walked in to school, exhausted, but just as enthusiastic about the
concert arrangements as the rest of us were.

Eagerly, we all gathered around the two boys as
they told us how, when they kept digging through that drift, they finally found
Jory's front hoof standing on top of a fence post! They had gone to the yard of the neighbour that lived near the ravine, get
wire cutters and an axe, and cut through that fence first before they unhitched
the horses from the sleigh and let them jump their way to freedom.

My father then took the tired horses back to the
open field, leading them out of the ravine single file. With the use of the neighbour's logging chain, he pulled the
sleigh out of the snow backwards onto the field where he was able to hitch the
horses back on to it to drive home.

"Your father said for all of us to stay for
the concert. It's no use going home
after four and coming back again. Your
folks and our folks won’t be attending
the concert tonight at all, so we'll have to walk home at night. He said to make sure and wrap up
warm."

That evening, our excitement knew no bounds as
the school filled to capacity with parents, neighbours, friends, and even some more
distant relatives, this in spite of the cold weather. As we danced, and sang, and performed our
various pieces, nobody could have matched the exhilaration that each one of us
students experienced.

It was after midnight when the concert finished
and everyone left the school for the various destinations. For the first mile of our trip home, we got a
ride with Mr. Bilous who had come
to see the concert. We rode in a warm
but very crowded van, pulled by horses decked with jingle bells that tinkled
merrily as the horses trotted along. We
were deliriously happy and everyone talked ecstatically about the wonderful
evening as the bells jingled along outside.

Just before the ravine, we came to the crossroads
where Mr. Bilous had to turn
off to his farm. Climbing out of the van, we got out into a
beautiful crisp night, a million stars in the sky and the moon shining down on
us in all its glory, lighting up the night with a silvery blue haze that
sparkled on the snow around us like gleaming diamonds strewn at random over the
landscape. The shadows of the trees cast
an ethereal glow onto the path below.

That second mile, we walked home with the boys
and then ourselves the rest of the way.
We didn't feel the cold; we were too excited by all the happenings of
the day and especially the concert. We
even had a dozen or so slides down the steep drifts that glistened so brightly
in the moonlight, like some captivating picture from a book of fairy
tales.

We needed no electric lights twinkling with
bright colors among the trees to tell us it was Christmas time. No star copied or created by man, could
possibly match the stars that lit our way that evening. Mother Nature provided all the color and
sparkle that man could imagine but never equal.
It was wonderful and glorious and great to be alive because it was
Christmas!

Mother and Father were awake when we got home. They were waiting for us and for our report
of the concert. In those days, no one
thought of being afraid to go out at night and children of school age were
always adept at getting to where they were going with little or no
supervision. Cold was considered a
greater enemy than any predator but if you were dressed properly even that was
not a threat and everyone survived. Who
cared if it was cold? It was a Very
Merry Christmas in our hearts!